Tag Archives: Data Science

Apache Impala (incubating) enables low-latency interactive SQL queries on data stored in HDFS, Amazon S3, Apache Kudu, and Apache HBase. With the availability of the R package implyr on CRAN and GitHub, it’s now possible to query Impala from R using the popular package dplyr.

In late 2016, Ben Lorica of O’Reilly Media declared that “2017 will be the year the data science and big data community engage with AI technologies.” Deep learning on GPUs has pervaded universities and research organizations prior to 2017, but distributed deep learning on CPUs is now beginning to gain widespread adoption in a diverse set of companies and domains. While GPUs provide top-of-the-line performance in numerical computing, CPUs are also becoming more efficient and much of today’s existing hardware already has CPU computing power available in bulk.

Recently we worked with a customer that needed to run a very significant amount of models in a given day to satisfy internal and government regulated risk requirements. Several thousand model executions would need to be supported per hour. Total execution time was very important to this client. In the past the customer used thousands of servers to meet the demand. They need to run many derivations of this model with different economic factors to satisfy their requirements.

Data scientists have hundreds of probability distributions from which to choose. Where to start?

Data science, whatever it may be, remains a big deal. “A data scientist is better at statistics than any software engineer,” you may overhear a pundit say, at your local tech get-togethers and hackathons. The applied mathematicians have their revenge, because statistics hasn’t been this talked-about since the roaring 20s. They have their own legitimizing Venn diagram of which people don’t make fun.

In July 2015, Cloudera re-affirmed its position since 2013: that Apache Spark is on course to replace MapReduce as the default general-purpose data processing engine for Apache Hadoop. Thanks to initiatives like the One Platform Initiative,